The Mystery of the Missing Follett House!

For the last couple of months, I have been trying to figure out more information about the parts of the Follett House that are no longer a part of it, or as I have started calling it in my mind, the mystery of the missing Follett House. Unfortunately, neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot will be showing up in Follett’s beautiful double parlor to make a grand explanation of the mystery and more is the pity of it for all of us. With neither of those legendary detectives showing up, I was left to myself to solve this mystery. What is most frustrating about trying to solve this mystery is how little evidence I have to go on! The grand sum of the evidence, which I will happily share with you all in this post, is two Sanborn fire insurance maps, a description of the house the Follett’s granddaughter wrote, and a brief mention of the missing parts in the sale of the property in 1895. 

Let’s first start at the beginning. Construction of the Follett House started in 1834, most likely. Construction on the house finished in 1837. The 1837 date is the one listed in Oran Follett’s obituary when he died in 1894. We do have some great pictures of the front of the Follett house when the Folletts were still living there (the picture above, for example). Unfortunately, we have no good pictures of the parts of the Follett House that no longer exist. This is where the Sanborn maps enter the picture, no pun intended. A quick note about Sanborn maps, yellow means it is a structure made of wood and blue means stone. 

 

 

 

The map above is the 1886 Sanborn map of the Follett House. Though it does not show interior walls, it does have some details of the house. It shows the front steps, the portico at the front of the house, a woodshed, but most importantly it shows us the parts of the Follett House that are no longer there. The three main parts that are missing are a stone building running parallel to Adams Street and was attached to what we now call Mrs. Follett’s parlor, a wooden structure attached to the long part of the building, and some other structure attached to the back of the Folletts’ double parlor. 

 

 

The map above is the 1893 Sanborn map. This would have been made the year before Mr. Follett died and can be considered the final form of the house while the Folletts owned it. Yet oddly, it is missing some details from the last map. There are no stairs or portico in this drawing. The woodshed is also not included in this map, though it may have been torn down, since the Folletts did have a furnace installed at some time.  

The frustrating thing is that these maps just show the basic outlines of the missing parts but do not tell us more than that. For additional details we need to turn to an account by their granddaughter, Alice Eliza Ball. Alice wrote a combined biography of her grandparents plus some other history relating to them. Now, this account was written in 1939, so it was written 45 years after she had last been in that house. Because of this, we may have to take her accounts with a grain of salt. 

Now Alice describes the long room as, “a large dining-room, with a dumb waiter and a tremendous fire-place, afterward boarded over.” The other piece of the house that was located at the back of the double parlor, she describes as, “placed in the "octagon", a small conservatory back of the two great parlors.” Unfortunately, she does not talk about what that long wooden structure attached to the dining room would be. My best guess is it is a porch, since it looked over what would have been the kitchen garden. 

Thanks to Alice we know what the missing parts of the house were used for, but we do not really have a great description of them. We can estimate the size from the scale on the Sanborn maps. The dining room would have been about 43 feet long by about 20 feet wide and the conservatory would have been about 20 feet wide where it was attached to the house, about10 feet wide at the furthest point, and would have been about 10 feet long. 

Let’s take a look to see what information we can get from the December 1895 deed. After Mr. Follett’s death, in 1894, the family sold the house to a real estate broker. The real estate broker then sold what today is left of the Follett House in 1895 to one family and the rest of the property, where the dining room and conservatory were and two houses now sit, to Gustav Jarecki Sr., a local builder. Here is all the deed has to say about the missing parts of the house, “...as a further consideration to tear down the Stone Building on the premises above described and close up any openings that will be made or left in the Three Story Building...by putting in Windows or closing up with Masonry Work.”

 

Homes were built on the land formerly occupied by the Follet House addition

As you can read, this tells us basically nothing! It gives us a rough date as to when they were torn down. It talks about the stone structure that is the dining room but does not describe it at all. The part that says above described is talking about the boundaries of the property, not a description of the stone building. It doesn’t even mention the conservatory or even the porch attached to the dining room! 

What have we learned from all of this? We know that the three missing parts of the Follett House were the dining room, a conservatory, and a porch attached to the dining room (probably). We know about the approximate size of both additions from the Sanborn maps. We know that they were torn down in late 1895 or early 1896. And that is about it. Without exterior or interior pictures, we will not learn much more about those parts. While it is fine that we may never know anything more about those parts that were torn down without new evidence becoming known, it is both frustrating to me as a historian and is a very unsatisfying end to this story. Such is life when researching historical topics, there is not always a satisfying ending like there is in a good detective novel.